Services :: Data Recovery in Middletown

You don’t need to ship your drive across the country for professional data recovery. You don’t even need to leave Middletown. My lab is at 800 Fossil Creek Court—right here on the Middletown–Eastwood border, near the Lake Forest neighborhood, about three minutes past the Shelbyville Road exit off I-265. This is where every recovery happens, from diagnosis through delivery, using the same class of professional equipment found in national data recovery facilities.

I’m Steve Schardein. I’ve been running Triple-S Computers from this address since 2006, and data recovery has been one of my core specialties for most of that time. I handle every case myself—no employees, no outsourcing, no hand-offs. When a Middletown neighbor drops off a failing drive, they’re handing it directly to the person who will diagnose it, image it, recover it, and explain what happened in a detailed written report afterward.

Your Drive Stays Here

This matters more than most people realize. When you send a drive to a national lab, it gets packed in a box, shipped through a logistics chain, received by intake staff, queued behind other cases, assigned to an engineer you’ll never speak to, and eventually shipped back. The whole process can take two to four weeks and cost $800–$1,500 for a routine hard drive recovery.

Here, you can drop the drive off on the way to Kroger and pick up the recovered data a few days later. I’ll call you if I have questions. I’ll tell you exactly what I found. And you’ll pay a fraction of what those labs charge, because I don’t carry the overhead of a national marketing budget, multiple facilities, and layers of staff.

How a Recovery Actually Works in My Lab

Every case starts the same way: I connect your drive to professional hardware—typically a DeepSpar Disk Imager or USB Stabilizer 10Gb—and perform a noninvasive diagnosis. This tells me whether the problem is mechanical (the drive itself is failing), logical (the data’s file structure is corrupted or overwritten), or somewhere in between. I give you a flat-rate price quote based on what I find, and if you approve, I proceed.

For mechanically failing drives, the imaging process is the most critical step. The DeepSpar equipment intercepts every command between the drive and the computer, managing read attempts at the firmware level. It can disable the drive’s internal error-correction (which generates heat and wears out the heads), skip over damaged areas and return later with different strategies, and shut the drive down instantly if it detects signs of imminent head failure. This is the difference between recovering 100% of your data and losing it permanently—and it’s why general-purpose software on a regular PC isn’t sufficient for a failing drive.

Once imaging is complete, the logical recovery begins: I reconstruct the filesystem, validate file integrity, and copy the recovered data to new media. The entire process typically takes a few days for a single drive and up to a week or more for complex RAID arrays.

A Failing Laptop Drive with a Near-Perfect Outcome

A Middletown-area client brought in a laptop drive that had been getting progressively slower and had finally stopped booting entirely. This was a hybrid SSHD—a mechanical drive with a small solid-state cache—and it was in rough shape. The drive had accumulated significant mechanical damage, and standard attempts to access it were met with constant read errors and stalling.

Using the DeepSpar Disk Imager, I ran a 24-hour imaging session with multiple passes, employing different read strategies for each problematic region: forward reads, reverse reads, offset approaches, and carefully managed timeout adjustments to prevent the drive from overheating or seizing. The result: 1.16 TB of data extracted, with 97.7% of files in perfect condition. Another 2.2% were video files with minor, mostly imperceptible glitches in isolated frames. A single file out of nearly 6,000 was unrecoverable—less than one-tenth of one percent.

For a drive in that mechanical condition, that outcome borders on remarkable. It’s the kind of result that only happens when the imaging is managed at the hardware level, with professional tools designed specifically for failing media.

A PCB Swap That Saved Years of Photography

Not every recovery follows the standard playbook. A 4 TB external hard drive arrived containing years of professional photography and Lightroom catalogs. It wouldn’t initialize at all—not on the DeepSpar, not through any standard connection. After inspecting the circuit board, I found loose connections on the USB adapter and bridged them to bypass the damaged section. From there, I dropped the connection to USB 2.0 (the controller was too unstable for full-speed operation), worked through dozens of initialization attempts, and eventually coaxed a stable drive ID out of it.

Once I had that ID, the DeepSpar equipment held onto it while I imaged the entire drive over the course of several days. Filesystem mapping with R-Studio Technician allowed me to prioritize the actual user data, reducing stress on the failing hardware. The result: 100% of the critical data—photos, Lightroom catalogs, all of it—recovered intact. The client had been quoted $1,500 or more by a national lab for this same drive.

A Five-Drive Drobo That Nobody Else Would Touch

RAID recoveries are where the complexity really escalates. A client brought in a Drobo BeyondRAID enclosure with five drives—a proprietary array format that most standard RAID tools can’t even recognize. The enclosure had failed, and the client couldn’t access any of their data.

I started by imaging all five drives individually using DeepSpar equipment, creating bit-perfect forensic copies so the originals wouldn’t be touched again. Then, using UFS Explorer Professional Recovery, I scanned for Drobo’s proprietary RAID metadata, located it, and reassembled the virtual array in software. Copied the entire volume to a new external SSD—100% of user data recovered, formatted cross-platform so it would work on both Mac and PC. The total cost was $1,200: $300 per drive used in the reconstruction, with no markup on the replacement media.

What Recovery Costs and What You Can Expect

I keep pricing simple: logical recoveries (accidental deletion, partition overwrites, corrupted filesystems on healthy drives) start at $249. Most advanced recoveries involving mechanically failing hardware are $399. The majority of all cases—regardless of type—come in at $499 or less. RAID arrays are priced per drive, typically $300–$400 each. Diagnosis is always free, and if I can’t recover your data, you owe nothing.

If the recovery requires new media for the returned data, I order it in your name at my cost—Samsung portable SSDs, flash drives, whatever makes sense for the volume of data. No markup, no profit on parts, ever. That policy has been in place since I started this business.

The Honest Limits of What I Do

I handle everything from simple file deletions through advanced firmware-level imaging and multi-drive RAID reconstruction. But I do not perform cleanroom procedures. If your drive has suffered a catastrophic head crash, a motor seizure, or platter damage that requires physical disassembly in a particle-free environment, that work needs a different facility with different tools. I’ll diagnose the problem, explain what’s happening, and refer you to a lab I trust—so you don’t waste money or make things worse. I’d rather turn down a job than do one badly.

Reaching My Lab

From most of Middletown, I’m a five-to-ten-minute drive. If you’re on the Shelbyville Road corridor, head east past the Middletown commercial strip toward Eastwood—I’m just outside I-265 on the south side, in the Landis Lakes area near Lake Forest. From Anchorage, take Evergreen Road toward Middletown and continue on Shelbyville. From J-Town or Fern Creek, take the Gene Snyder north to the Shelbyville exit. Parking is right at the door.

Stop the Drive, Then Call Me

If a drive in your Middletown home or office has started clicking, grinding, disconnecting, or simply won’t show up anymore—stop using it. Don’t run chkdsk. Don’t try consumer recovery software. Don’t keep powering it on to “check if it works now.” Every attempt risks making the damage permanent. Unplug it, set it aside, and call me at (502) 233-4393. I’ll give you a clear assessment, a fair price, and a recovery performed right here in the neighborhood by someone whose reputation depends on doing it right.